Oh, High-Speed Canada

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Oh, High-Speed Canada

If you want cheap, high-speed Internet access, think about moving North of the border.

The low prices of high-speed Internet access being supplied by Bell Canada and its independent affiliates have led a group of Internet service providers to ask the Canadian telecommunications regulatory agency to step in and regulate pricing.

As the ice on Canadian lakes thickens, independent ISPs are all steamed up about Bell Canada's ADSL prices. The Canadian Association for Internet Providers (CAIP) claims that Bell Canada, the biggest Canadian phone company, is using a monopoly of local-loop wiring and its stake in Nortel – the Canadian telecom company that makes ADSL access devices – to subsidize rock-bottom ADSL prices.

Bell Canada is planning to price ADSL services for as low as US$26 a month, a price the ISPs say could never be profitable.

CAIP officials claim the lowest ADSL price offered by an independent ISP is about $100 monthly.

"Remember the AT&T monopoly?" asked Ron Kawchuk, president of the CAIP. "It's alive and well North of the border."

With anti-regulatory spirit afoot and cheap high-speed Internet access proliferating in the Great White North, experts say the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission – the Canadian equivalent of the US Federal Communications Commission – will be reluctant to do anything.

"I find the notion that the pricing for Internet services is anticompetitive kind of strange," said Michael Geist, an assistant professor of Law at the University of Ottawa who follows telecommunications regulations in Canada. "If anything, Bell Canada's rates are competitive with pricing in the cable-modem market."

Geist says the point on ADSL pricing is moot. Cable-modem providers can provide cheaper high-speed Internet access than even Bell Canada's ADSL plans. He said he doubts the CRTC will take any action on Internet services while it is involved in so-called new media hearings that will determine its role in regulating the Internet industry.